Dan Melchior, All At Sea (NO=FI, 2014)
I don’t know if it’s the second wave of the ‘Vid hitting my home city or just my own curiosity, but lately I’ve been gravitating farther from rock’n’roll and more towards abstract music. I think it’s a bit of both. I’ve always been drawn to this kind of stuff, but the grey skies, rising infection rates and restrictive government measures have me wanting to crawl inside a cocoon of tape hiss, accidental harmonies, crackling bass sounds.
I’ve had this record for ages, having bought it after I’d already fallen in love with his most straightforward stuff back in the late 00s, and it was probably my introduction to Dan Melchior's more cryptic side. First of all, his distinctive voice and singing style are almost completely absent from All At Sea and so are songs, meaning ordinary songs. So what’s in it?
Well, at the start there’s a sort of percussive tape loop that sounds like an old steam-powered machine, huffing and puffing and getting overpowered by some kind of string instrument in reverse filtered through a delay pedal. Then there are shards of songs flying in the hissing wind of the four track, stumbling on each other, crashing on walls of distortion or stopping abruptly. Synthesizers and organs buzz and vibrate. Then there are fucked up recordings of full songs chopped up, distorted, defaced.
For somebody who later claimed to be playing ‘the greys’ (a play on 'the blues', to indicate an even bleaker shade of melancholy), Melchior’s work is tridimensional and colorful. Right now, actual songs, recognizable songs, are too real for me. I’m already overwhelmed by reality, I don’t need human voices singing about human stuff as if this world didn’t exist enough already. The analog quality of the sound and the sort of playfulness in the construction of these pieces allows me to step into a warm dream world, sad, yes, but at least not real, like a toy island inhabited by friendly ghosts, underwater organ players, fuzzy hallucinations and a nice parrot named Glen. It’s not much, but it takes the edge off of reality.
Click here to listen to All At Sea on Bandcamp.
Follow GRRAWR on Instagram to get a record review every Wednesday in your IG feed.
